Menu
Having spent the majority of his career working in Product Management at Microsoft working on HR-focused products, Humanly CEO and founder Prem Kumar understands firsthand the challenges of prioritizing diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, as well as its importance.
Through Humanly, Kumar has been able to address a common concern within the recruiting industry, and specifically the conversational recruiting space, which is the lack of tools and support for recruiters to be able to engage with candidates in a more human way at scale.
Conversational recruiting prioritizes informal conversation as a way to gauge a candidate’s suitability for a role beyond their skills and experience on paper and has been shown to deliver better outcomes for job seekers and recruiters alike.
However, Humanly’s mission goes beyond facilitating a better hiring process; at the heart of the business is a desire to help employer’s overcome unconscious bias in hiring, improve diversity and inclusion, and ultimately, counteract the effects of institutional racism.
A diverse workplace not only benefits employees, but the business as well. Companies with greater diversity among their workforce have been shown to have a 19% greater innovation revenue than their homogenous counterparts.
Improving company diversity starts with a more equitable recruiting process; however, in spite of the evidence, many organizations still face difficulties in understanding how the nuances of their hiring process can affect the outcome.
For example, through their research Humanly discovered that when interviewers spoke at a pace of 150 words per minute or more, candidates for whom English was a second language were at a distinct disadvantage.
With Talent Acquisition professionals facing greater pressures than ever before, having to sift through an unprecedented volume of applicants and identify the best ones for the job, providing an equitable experience can be a real challenge.
The relationship between job-seeker and recruiter has long been a contentious one, but Humanly seeks to alleviate grievances on both sides by leading with empathy.
“Any time you’re having a two way conversation with a job candidate, we want to make that more efficient and more equitable,” said Kumar.
The startup has seen its fair share of challenges, starting with the founding of the company at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, Humanly has had to contend with economic downturn and market uncertainty, making investors reluctant to make big moves.
Add to that the rise of AI, and a work culture that’s shifting away from the traditional office model, and the Humanly team had their work cut out for them.
While Kumar acknowledges the importance of AI and its role in assisting recruiters, he maintains that recruitment is still a human-centered process, and it should remain that way.
“With the rise of AI, a lot of folks may be tempted to turn to technology for what were formerly human-driven processes. I think AI plays an important role, but how do we actually help it elevate folks?”
“I had met Cherif [Habib] at a tech accelerator event series,” said Kumar, “and instantly felt a connection. Aside from being incredible entrepreneurs, the team at Formentera Capital truly cared about the problem we were trying to solve.”
Beyond being mission-driven, Kumar appreciated Formentera Capital’s commitment to helping startups move forward.
“Formentera Capital has certainly been there when we need them; everything from you know making intros to other potential customers to giving advice on our growth strategy, obviously the capital itself. So they’re very available, which I love, in spite of the fact that they’re extremely busy. It’s almost surprising how available they’re able to make themselves for folks in the portfolio.”
With the support of Formentera Capital, Humanly has 3X’d their growth as a company, expanding their customer base from about 15 clients to 300 companies that are actively working with Humanly to help improve their recruitment process. In the last year alone, they processed over a million applicants, most of whom reported that Humanly facilitated a “more equitable, fair and efficient candidate conversation.”
Humanly CEO & Founder Prem Kumar
According to Kumar, “At the end of the day, we want to make any direct conversation with job candidates for high volume hiring more efficient and more equitable. So we definitely see ourselves continuing to invest in candidate experience, in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and in leveraging AI to do that.”
Kumar sees the Humanly team growing rapidly over the coming months, with plans to 3X the size of the team by 2025. This would allow them to work with a higher number of candidates, increasing the breadth of their impact. To date, they’ve already impacted the hiring process in businesses like Microsoft and Worldwide Flight Services.
Two months ago, Humanly closed their Series A round, raising $12 million to help build the business and grow the Humanly team.
“We want to be the leader in two years from now in conversational AI for professional high volume hiring,” Kumar said, “And part of that is being a thought leader in ethical AI and using artificial intelligence in a way that is ethical and safe for our users. So those are some of the things we’re hoping to accomplish.”
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
When Aydin Mirzaee and his co-founding team grew their first company in their early 20’s, FluidSurveys, they embodied true tech entrepreneurship: they moved fast, focused heavily on the product, and built an incredible culture fueled on passion. In 2014, Mirzaee and team led the organization to a successful acquisition by SurveyMonkey.
Post-acquisition, Mirzaee remained onboard at SurveyMonkey. He found himself suddenly embedded within a mature organization that counted over 750 employees and was rich in processes, structure, and methodical focus – operational elements which FluidSurveys pre-acquisition hadn’t had.
“Looking back, it’s almost incredible how we made it to just under 100 people and a successful acquisition without ever hosting a single one-on-one meeting, performance review, town hall or quarterly business review.”
Realizing that structured management processes were highly important to SurveyMonkey’s success, Mirzaee understood the power of meeting cadences – but saw an opportunity to optimize them.
“Managers at SurveyMonkey held some very important meetings – just like most companies in the world do,” said Mirzaee. “We know that leadership teams spend a large portion of their time in meetings – but there was no way of gauging how effective, productive or enjoyable any of those meetings really were.”
Indeed, 31% of managers attend over 16 meetings each week – but over 46% of meetings do not have a clear purpose or goal. Moreover, we know that 80% of employees leave a company as a result of their direct manager. Marketers had their own tools like Marketo; Sales teams had Salesforce; HR teams had HRIS systems like Greenhouse; but there was no tool for managers.
The world runs on meetings led by managers – but equally so remains the bane of many a team’s existence. The “meetings problem” had yet to be solved.
Mirzaee and his co-founding team saw an opportunity for a tool for leaders and managers which could not only bring a deeply-lacking efficiency structure to meetings but could make them more enjoyable.
Fellow was officially launched in September 2019 – and Mirzaee confirms the product reflects in many ways the founding team’s own growth as leaders. “With our first two startups, regardless of their success, we were running them like entrepreneurs. As we built and grew Fellow, we understood and learned how to be true Operators – knowledge and best practices which we built into the product for managers to benefit from.”
Committed to “never build[ing] in isolation,” Fellow pitched Shopify as a first beta-client in their shared hometown of Ottawa – and the feedback from Shopify’s leadership team was exceptionally positive.
“We spent an incredible amount of time simply listening to managers, both at Shopify and beyond,” said Mirzaee. “We wanted to understand their needs, the reality of leading teams and their associated processes, and how we could best support them.”
Fellow founders, from left: Aydin Mirzaee, Samuel Cormier-Iijima and Amin Mirzaee.
Today, Fellow counts 40+ employees and has recorded 2M+ meeting notes on their flagship product, a platform which allows for collaborative agendas, meeting action items, to-do lists, team OKR’s, feedback exchange, real-time notetaking and more. Fellow connects with major tools like Slack, Google Calendar, Jira, Asana, and others, making it easy for organizations to seamlessly integrate Fellow with their existing productivity and project management stack.
Fellow raised an impressive initial seed round of $6.5M USD in 2019, which they leveraged to perfect the product in terms of features and scalability.
Since then, their customer roster has grown into an impressive one, with multiple enterprise-level organizations including Motorola, Uber, Shopify, Stanford University, Vidyard and others powering up their meetings with Fellow.
Fellow’s Series A of $24M USD, with participation by Formentera Capital, will help support the next phase of their growth by focusing on commercialization, building better workflows, expanding their reach and developing more integrations with their partner ecosystem.
When asked about their decision to bring on Formentera Capital as part of their investment team, Mirzaee was clear: “We saw in [Formentera Capital] a team of skilled Operators. We were really excited to continue to learn from them.”
The team at Formentera Capital are also users of Fellow at their respective organizations. “Aside from being advocates for the product,” said Mirzaee, “they are supporters and advisors who are there when we need them.”
The story of Fellow, a product which mirrors the evolution of its founders from entrepreneurs to operational business leaders, is an inspiring one – and the future is bright for the company. Their goal to solve a universal problem, ineffective and joyless meetings, is well on its way.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
Society in general, and capital markets in particular, has become acutely aware of the interconnection between corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and the need to address systemic risks, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, income inequality and more. Companies have a key role to play in addressing these risks. There is increasing recognition of the strategic value of sustainability which is being elevated to the C-suite and the Board level with growing pressure from investors.
Once merely communicated by corporations, with little accountability, oversight or standards to track accuracy or impact, ESG data is now subject to vetted, standardized reporting.
Indeed, in 2019, 90% of S&P 500 Index Companies published sustainability reports — a number that skyrocketed since the 20% measured in 2011.
“For the economy and for society to thrive, public and private corporations alike need to be acting in more responsible, sustainable ways,” says Charles Assaf. “It is time the needle around ESG impact is moved forward in a tangible way.”
Enter Novisto: a purpose-driven SaaS organization on a mission to be the world’s leading software solution for integrated corporate sustainability management. Co-founded in 2019 by Charles Assaf, Edouard Clement and Marian Borca, Novisto stemmed from the innovation lab at Diagram Ventures, one of Canada’s pre-eminent venture launchpads for technology startups in the financial, insurance and healthcare sectors.
Novisto streamlines data collection, improves data quality, benchmarks performance and helps companies communicate more effectively with internal and external stakeholders. The result: a robust ERP-like system for ESG data and reporting powered by automation and AI-driven insights.
Marian Borca (left), Charles Assaf (middle) and Edouard Clement (right), founders of Novisto.
An end-to-end, enterprise-grade solution, Novisto supports companies at every stage of their sustainability journey, helping them create value through smarter management and reporting of key business areas such as cybersecurity, GHG emissions, employee diversity, ethics and human rights.
“There are hundreds of ESG metrics that are extremely key to companies,” said Assaf. “But the process of extracting, tracking and reporting on those metrics has historically been deeply fragmented.” Novisto uses high-performing automation to ease the collection and disclosure of ESG data depending on the audience that requires it: shareholders, government regulators, and end-customers alike are empowered to understand, measure and use ESG data to benchmark against competitors in a concrete way.
The necessity for active ESG management is rising – rapidly. The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) recently stated that it “sees an urgent need to improve the consistency, comparability, and reliability of sustainability reporting.” Numerous countries in the European Union now require concrete ESG disclosure by corporations – and the same standards are finding their way into the North American market. A recent report by KPMG confirms that in 2020 “…at least 70 percent of N100 companies reported on sustainability in all industries.”
Though regulatory ESG disclosure requirements have not yet become subject to law in Canada and the U.S., many companies are eager to lead their industries into a more accountable, responsible future. Novisto counts numerous major customers like CAE, Intact, JetBlue, the TMX Group, Dollarama, Power Corporation, Great West Life and others.
Novisto’s latest Series A round of $8M USD, with participation by Formentera Capital, will be used to triple their engineering team, build the go-to-market strategy for the U.S. and Europe, and further their commercialization at scale.
The decision to partner up with Formentera Capital was an easy one. “We have enormous respect for Cherif [Habib] and the entire team at Formentera,” said Assaf. “In them, we saw a little bit of ourselves: authenticity, strong leadership and a commitment to building purpose-driven businesses.”
Indeed, the sense of purpose is palpable at Novisto.
While companies continue to launch charitable initiatives, engage with causes and pursue social impact externally, there remains much to be done in the realm of concrete, measurable and accountable practices that bring about true change.
“The burden of building a sustainable future for society cannot solely rest on non-profit organizations and governments,” said Assaf. “With greater focus on ESG performance, resilience is built within companies. What it achieves benefits not only employees, clients and customers, but society, and our future, as a whole.”
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
The value of professional mentorship has long been established – but the process of acquiring a mentor and building impactful mentor-mentee relationships can be intimidating, uncomfortable, and short-lived. An unstructured, non-methodical and entirely-analog experience, professionals in search of mentorship have traditionally been left to their own devices to source and connect with potential mentors.
Montreal-based entrepreneurs Ashley Werhun and Katherine Macnaughton fell on the problem almost by accident.
Werhun, a professional dancer, and Macnaughton, a filmmaker, spent the majority of their lives in the creative world. As their professional arts careers flourished and began attracting public recognition, they began receiving requests for mentorship from younger artists at large. A mentorship practice in the arts was in-demand – but the process was far from ideal. After speaking with hundreds of artists who had long desired mentorship but “simply couldn’t find or access it easily,” they realized it was a problem that went beyond the creative world.
Werhun recalls they were constantly asking themselves, “Why is mentorship so hard to get? Why isn’t it accessible if everyone wants it?”
Their instincts were bang-on: numerous studies show the vast majority of millennials – over 87% – seek mentorship, but less than 37% actually have one. Companies equally benefit: a mentorship culture can contribute to a 72% increase in retention and employee engagement – a particularly pertinent issue in a distributed post-Covid world of work.
The solution came to life as Mentorly, a full-service SaaS platform that revolutionizes the mentorship process and experience. A turn-key software solution, Mentorly includes matchmaking and profile viewing, native video calling, calendar bookings, instant messaging, analytics and (much) more.
The result? A formalized, non-intimidating, and digital-first transformation of mentorship as we’ve known it.
According to Werhun, the biggest challenge with mentorship comes from “big intention and low execution.” Mentorly facilitates mentorship by making the necessary resources accessible at one’s fingertips in a down-to-earth experience so those “big intentions” can actually be achieved. By systematizing a traditionally intangible, emotion-driven experience, Mentorly facilitates true relationship-building.
The mission to “de-intimidate” mentorship can be felt at every turn, from the vibrancy of the Mentorly website to the beautiful interface facilitating a fun user experience. But behind the design is a wildly-powerful, flexible tech stack built to easily onboard thousands of users with the strength of any enterprise-level software solution.
The aesthetics/function dichotomy lives even in Werhun herself: she exudes a sense of play and passion with a drive, discipline and a commanding of authority that can be felt even in a brief conversation.
“Mentorship has been left behind in innovation for too long,” Werhun said.
The announcement of their most recent raise, with participation by Formentera Capital and other private equity investors, affirms Mentorly’s goal to become the category leader in mentorship programs and to act as a catalyst for growth for people and organizations alike is well underway. After spending years perfecting the scalability of the platform’s back-end technology, the latest round of investment will act as fuel to furthering the commercialization of Mentorly Enterprise, onboarding larger customers and scaling its impact.
“Investor fit” for Werhun and Macnaughton is something they never take lightly – and the decision to partner up with Formentera Capital was no different.
“Formentera Capital are simply smart tech entrepreneurs with proven track-records. They retain a connection to the humanistic element behind the technology, which aligns with our core values,” says Werhun. “From an advisory perspective, we feel we can pick up the phone any day, anytime knowing they will be there to guide us.”
While rapidly becoming Canadian tech darlings, Werhun and Macnaughton remain loyal to their roots: the problem they originally set out to solve – mentorship in the arts world – remains a major focus of theirs. Their clients in the arts industry include Canada’s Music Incubator, Creative Manitoba, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, among others.
The future is bright for Mentorly as they continue to help organizations yield a powerful digital solution to fortify human connectivity. Despite the exciting growth and recognition, Werhun confirms every round of financing means another opportunity to impact the lives of others. “We get to continue spending time working on this incredible thing that has been the greatest pleasure of my life.”
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
If you’ve read Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer, an annual report gathering data from nearly 30 global markets, you’ll know one thing for sure: 2020 saw trust decline rapidly across the globe.
From government institutions to corporate brands to social media to CEO credibility, 2020 proved to be a turbulent year filled with systemic inequality, misinformation and general sentiments of panic. Trust, according to Edelman’s report, is at an unprecedented low.
Incode, a fast-growing Silicon-Valley-based technology company, is responding to the trust crisis.
“Above all, we generate trust,” said Ricardo Amper, CEO. “Whether it’s between suppliers, customers, brands, the world becomes less skeptical and more trustworthy by default once basic identity verification is removed from the equation.”
Incode’s proprietary, AI-powered software for identity recognition and authentication is considered to be one of the most robust, advanced and secure solutions to a complex problem: identity verification in a fully-remote world.
Originally launched in 2015 as a secure photo-sharing application, Amper realized the technology he and his team had created had big potential – and pivoted into the world of identity management.
“I’ve always been passionate about privacy and access,” said Amper. “But for me, it’s also about the larger-scale impact our technology can have on the world: secure election/voting digitization. In 10 years from now, I believe all elections globally will leverage digital identity verification for secure remote voting.”
Verifying identity in the most secure way for remote or “mail-in” voting becomes another major use-case for Incode’s technology. The digitization of elections and modern voting systems has always been blocked by one major issue: privacy and identity verification. With Incode’s proprietary platform, managing and verifying identities of voters submitting ballots from anywhere in their country (or beyond) has the potential to transform election systems (and election outcomes) entirely. Fast-changing laws, corruption or difficulty of access have historically “blocked” voters in rural areas in countries like Mexico from exercising their fundamental rights. Incode’s technology becomes a unique, powerful solution.
Access to financial services is another use-case Amper and his customers have seen. Incode’s technology also allows users in those same remote, rural communities to have access to financial services they normally wouldn’t have access to. With more financial access and “trust” between consumers and institutions comes less risk – and, eventually, lower interest rates, higher wealth and lower poverty rates.
With a recent Series A raise of $25M, it’s clear that others agree in the power behind Incode. Led by DN Capital, 3L Capital and with participation by Formentera Capital, Incode’s latest round means tripling headcount and accelerating commercialization. Having experienced 4.5X growth in their first year in-market, with major customers in the banking world like Citi, Sabadell, and Banorte quickly joining onto Incode’s platform, the future is bright for the team.
When asked about Formentera Capital’s participation in Incode’s most recent round of funding, Amper knew he had met a VC firm aligned with his values.
“I quickly realized that Formentera Capital is a group of talented entrepreneurs who really believe in using tech for positive impact in the world,” said Amper. “After meeting Cherif {Habib} by chance through a Hackathon our companies participated in, then meeting other Formentera team members, I realized these were excellent advisors who were searching to build true partnerships – which resonated with me.”
The big goal for Incode?
“More trust, more democratization, more security, more access and less poverty,” said Amper. “Impact. It’s what makes me most excited about building Incode, today and moving forward.”
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
If you feel apprehensive about home renovations for fear of having a bad experience, you are not alone. According to a Léger survey conducted in October 2020 for Billdr Canada Inc. (Billdr), more than three-quarters (77%) of Montrealers say they still find it stressful today to undertake and coordinate major renovation work. Billdr was established with the mission to make renovation work simple, transparent and efficient in order to bring peace of mind to homeowners. The company has launched an online marketplace that supports homeowners and contractors throughout their projects.
The intelligent platform assigns a dedicated renovation expert that guides and supports homeowners step by step throughout their home renovation project.
“Billdr brings peace of mind to homeowners by offering a tailor-made quality support service. We cover all stages of the renovation, from the detailed definition of the project, development and review of architectural and engineering plans, detailed cost estimates, selection of a certified general contractor, to secure payment,” explains Bertrand Nembot, co-founder of Billdr.
Founded in early 2020 and based in Montreal, Billdr has gained the confidence and funding of angel investors in Canada (Formentera Capital), the UK (Simple Capital) and US (Aleka Capital) to finance its expansion, demonstrating international interest and need for such a solution.
The pandemic has accelerated or triggered the desire of more than a quarter (28%) of Montreal homeowners to undertake renovations. Since the start of its activities in February, Billdr has witnessed this trend firsthand. About $10 millions worth of projects were posted on the platform, mainly through word of mouth.
Within the context of a pandemic, many homeowners are having difficulty finding trusted contractors. All the more reason to turn to reliable resources on the market, especially when one considers that only 48% of Montreal landlords indicated they had conducted some form of background check before selecting a contractor and only 28% claimed they had conducted a check on the validity of the contractor’s permit with the Régie du bâtiment du Québec (RBQ).
“Billdr defines itself first and foremost as the trusted intermediary that creates and facilitates relationships between owners and general contractors. At Billdr, we work exclusively with certified and insured contractors who have a true passion for the trade and very high service standards,” says Bertrand Nembot. “And while the vast majority (85%) of Montreal homeowners are satisfied with the results of their renovations, only 52% report a good customer experience. So we’re here to respond to a real need to improve the customer experience.”
Read the full press release on Billdr here & visit their website here.
The partners of Formentera Capital have been actively investing in entrepreneurs for over a decade. Supporting fast-growth, high-impact startups from across the globe has been a passion for years now. But like so many individuals have felt since March 2020, there’s something about a moment of crisis that helps put things into focus. We realized that today, perhaps more than ever before, entrepreneurs with big dreams needed support, guidance and mentorship to weather the storms the world was throwing at us.
Formentera Capital is built by founders, for founders. We’ve been entrepreneurs for the majority of our lives – and we’ve lived through failure, experienced the rollercoaster and understand how to make it out of complex situations even stronger than when we entered them.
We formalized Formentera Capital for one main purpose: to provide real support (capital, network access and operational guidance) that passionate entrepreneurs need more than ever.
A deep sense of grit and resilience is the first thing we look for in entrepreneurs. We know what true grit looks like because we’ve learned to build it within ourselves. While this hasn’t been the first crisis we’ve lived through, we recognize it will be for many early-stage startups – and we are eager to help navigate the tumultuous waters a crisis brings on. Being able to remain steadfast, focused and persistent in the face of complex challenges is partly a learned skill and partly innate. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that it’s the grittiest entrepreneurs who commit to finding a way will always be the ones to find success.
Every partner at FC has experienced failure. Some of us have seen it so frequently that, in many ways, failure helped to build up an “underdog” mindset that we bring with us every day – even if we haven’t had any major failures in a while. Jean-Nicolas, for example, has some incredible stories around the failures he’s lived through – and because of them, he understands almost better than anyone what the entrepreneurial struggle truly looks (and feels) like.
Accordingly, every entrepreneur we invest in has an innate ability to push past fear. One of the first thing we ask ourselves after a pitch: “Has this person seen failure? Did they find a way to overcome that fear of failure? Do they feel like an underdog?”
We’re active members in the entrepreneurial community – and we care about supporting it. From our involvement as leader-members of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) to supporting the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) to being mentors and advisors in numerous startup competitions, we’ve committed hundreds of hours outside of our own businesses to support entrepreneurship across the globe. The entrepreneurial community has given us so much – and we are committed to giving back to that same community. We launched FC with one main goal: to provide much more than capital to entrepreneurs with big visions. We all know the value of capital injection (especially when you need it most); but our firm was founded on one key differentiating principal: we want to share knowledge, help implement structure and provide support that goes way beyond monetary value. We believe we’re all members of the same entrepreneurial community – and your success matters to us on a level beyond spreadsheets and ROI.
Grit and resilience, pursuing without fear and being part of a community are the main reasons we launched this firm. It may have taken a pandemic to sharpen our focus – but now more than ever before our focus is on supporting inspiring entrepreneurs across the world. We’re in it with you.
-Formentera Capital Team
Copyright © 2023 Formentera Capital
All Rights Reserved